


Flip of the Coin

by winterda



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Spoilers, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Protective Tony Stark, Tony Stark Has Issues
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 05:52:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14635434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterda/pseuds/winterda
Summary: Fate flipped the coin.  It was a fifty-fifty chance.  In one universe, it landed on one side for a boy.  In another, it landed on the other.Or: Peter lives.  That doesn't mean everything is anywhere near okay, though.





	Flip of the Coin

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own nothing. Disney owns all.  
> AN: First time writing a lot of these characters. I hope they turn out alright. Also, things are going to get dark. Be warned for that.

“We're in the end game now.”

A line appeared between Tony's eyebrows. A thousands thoughts rushed to slip between his lips only to die before they had the chance. Everything stuck in his throat even as he wanted to scream about how what Strange had done was so monumentally stupid, but his thoughts were stuck in a labyrinth where every turn lead back to the same thing.

_Why?_

Even as his breaths became short and his chest became tight, Tony held Strange's stare. There was something there; something Strange was trying to tell him but either didn't know how or thought that Tony was smart enough to understand without having to do so. It flickered there between them, a message that Tony was trying to decipher but couldn't right. Not now. His brain was too locked on to the half-formed message from six years ago that it found in the center and was now blaring like _Highway to Hell_ cranked up on the speakers in his workshop.

_You failed. Failed. Failed. Failed. They're all going to die because of you._

“What did you do?” 

The confusion in Quill's voice cut through Tony's panting breaths and pounding hearts, and caused him to blink. The spell that locked him in a staring contest with Strange broke, which caused Tony's focus to sharply pull itself to the pain in his side. It flared like a welding rod – hot and bright and hissing – but he could only grit his teeth. The suit was too damaged to do much more than the basic patch job he'd already performed on himself. It wasn't pretty, and it'd leave one hell of scar; but he wouldn't bleed out in the next two minutes. No, he'd get to live for at least a little while longer in pain until Thanos did whatever the hell he was planning to do. That was something, he guessed.

“Man, what – what the..” Quill paced like a confused puppy who didn't understand that it's owner had left him alone before focusing on Strange with a steely snarl. “What _the hell_ did you do?” 

“What I had to,” Strange snapped back. It must have used up whatever anger he had in reserve because he gave a tired sigh and said, “It was the only way.”

“Mr. Stark?”

The kid knelt next to him. His hands hoovered above the one Tony had pressed against his side as Peter's concerned gaze ticked back and forth between Tony's face and his injury. He wanted to help. He always wanted to help. It was one of the things that made him so annoyingly enduring to everyone around him. Tony knew it would only take one nod, and the kid would be doing whatever he asked to make it better. He wouldn't do anything before, though. They'd known each other long enough at this point that Peter understood that Tony didn't always want the kid to help him, even when he really needed it. Years of doing things on his own had made him stubborn like that. Just ask Pepper. And Rhodey. And Happy. And, well, anyone he knew him for more than five minutes.

It didn't help that Tony had developed this need to keep the kid from anything too dangerous about three seconds after meeting him. He knew Peter could handle himself – to an extent anyway. Usually if Tony was in enough trouble that he would need help, that was _in the extent_ that Peter definitely need to be anywhere near. Not that it stopped the kid. He could be annoyingly stubborn himself.

“It's fine, kid,” Tony said and forced himself to sit up. “Just...give me a hand up, would you?”

Tony placed his hand on the kid's shoulder and began to pull himself up. 

“Are – are you sure?” Peter asked in that eager puppy way of his. “I mean, I-I don't think – Oh, okay.”

The kid did his best help steady him as Tony rose to his feet. White-hot pain ran down his side as soon as he stretched out the wound, and any pressure threatened to black him out; but Tony just stood still and breathed through his nose until the worse was over. Like he said, he was stubborn. The kid's grip on his tightened as if to catch Tony if he fell, and Tony could practically feel the pinched, worried frown Peter was directing his way. Tony had long since learned how to, well, not ignore that look on Pepper's face, but at least not look directly at it. Years of practice had taught him that. It didn't matter that it was a fifteen-year-old ( _sixteen_ ) directing it at him. He wasn't going to chance it. 

It took a second for the worst of the vomit and possibly blackout inducing pain to finally start to dull to a standable level. Being a superhero and former hard partier had allowed him to have a rather high pain tolerance, so he knew when was safe enough to loosen his grip a bit on Peter's shoulder. 

Not that it made the kid let go, and Tony wasn't exactly going to complain about not losing his human crutch either.

“You _had_ to?” Quill hissed at Strange. “Are you kidding me?”

For a moment, Tony thought that Quill was going to punch Strange. It wasn't surprising, really. Strange had that effect on people even more so than Tony himself did, which would have been kind of impressive if it wasn't so damn frustrating. Strange would deserve it, too. Not that he probably didn't always deserve it, but they would all agree that the cataclysmic screw-up that Strange just pulled was the most deserving of all.

Peter shifted his stiff shoulders a bit to give Tony a better hold should he need it.

Well, maybe almost all of them would agree.

Quill clinched his fists so hard that Tony was surprised that there wasn't blood running from them, but he did keep himself from going any closer to Strange. Instead, Quill turned away from all of them and Tony thought he was about to start screaming out into the vast destruction of the devastated planet. Instead, a swift kick sent a rock flying. The planet's weird gravitational pull made it bounced across the dirt like a stone skipping on water before it hit another rock and landed back in the dirt.

“That was our best shot!” Quill yelled. “That was our best shot at taking out Thanos. And you gave up it and the stone up for the _Iron Asshole_ there?”

Tony pressed his lips. 

Quill wasn't wrong. Unless Strange knew something they all didn't, he wasn't worth whatever was coming. No matter how tense he could feel Peter becoming at his side, nothing was going to change that fact.

“Quill,” the Rock wannabe said from somewhere behind him and Peter. 

Tony had heard that tone before. It had come from a man who had once been his friend, who tried to stop Tony from murdering his BBF assassin friend. They were both probably trying to stop Thanos now, working together like they and using it like some kind of weird bonding exercise. On a logical level, Tony understood that someone who was brainwashed wasn't at fault and had it been almost anyone else that he killed that he could have let it go. But he killed his mom, and Tony didn't think that he'd ever be able to forgive that. Not fully. Not wholely. Maybe enough, but it didn't stop that small dark place inside of him from wishing – 

“Why?” Quill asked and thankfully cutting off Tony's line of though. “Why would you do something like that?”

That was a damn good question. One Tony would like to know himself.

“Got to admit, Doc,” he said. “I'm rather curious myself.”

He could feel the kid's worried eyes locked on him, but Tony refused to meet them. He just gave Pete a small pat on the shoulder to let him know it was okay, and then released his hold he had on the kid. Tony's side throbbed unhappily as he slowly walked towards Strange, but he ignored it because he was bullheaded and self-destructive and what was a little mortal wound when there was a big ass questioned that needed answering.

Strange frowned flatly as Tony continued, “We already talked about this. You and both know I wasn't worth that rock, so I can't help but wonder about the one-eighty.”

“I had to,” Strange replied. He sounded like so many of Tony's teachers had in the past when he was a kid and questioned what he was being taught. This is the way it is. Accept it.

Tony wasn't very good at that.

“That's not good enough,” the blue chick before he could.

She'd appeared in the middle of the battle. Tony had no idea how Thanos's apparently rebellious daughter found them or why she decided to fight against him, but anyone who hated the bastard enough to fight him was good enough right now his book. There was something indescribably cold about her that had nothing to do with all the electronics that he could see running throughout her skin and gave her a look like some kind of metallic, patch-work doll (or Frankenstein, if he were honest). She made Romanov look like a carebear in comparison.

And all that rage he could feel bubbling just below the skin was directed at Strange.

“Because of your actions, my father now has five of the stones he needs to destroy the universe,” she said. “The amount of bloodshed that is coming will be unimaginable.”

A tired sigh escaped from Strange as he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and bowed his head.

“I know.”

“Then why did you do it, man?” Quill asked. He had gone to his friends at some point to try and keep himself from murdering Strange. “Why did you give up the stone?”

Again, Strange said, “I had to.”

“You had to?” Quill repeated. “You _had to_? Really?”

“Yes, really,” Strange replied as he own frustration began to leak out. “I had to do something because he was going to kill Stark.”

“He _killed_ Gamora!” Quill snapped back. “If you would have just held off until I got –!”

“Calm,” Bug Girl said as she slipped around Quill and ducked under his arm. The two antenna on her forehead glowed softly in the planet's harsh red light as Quill the anger seemed to instantly melt away and he leaned into her touch. As their light died, she said, “You need to calm yourself, Peter Quill.”

Huh. That was useful. Tony remembered them saying she could do something like that when they were coming up with the plan, but he ability to put someone to sleep had been the thing they focused on at the time. If she could influence people's emotions like that at will, maybe he should offer her a job when this was all over. Pepper would certainly be glad for that kind of help.

_What job?_ The voice from earlier laughed. _There's no later. You failed. You failed, and now they're all going to die._

“I'm sorry. About your friend,” Strange said. “But I'm sure you understand that he's going to kill a lot more before this all said and done.”

“Then why did you do it?” Tony asked. 

It felt like the hundredth time that someone had asked it in the last few minutes, but there was no other question to ask. They had to know – Tony had to know – because half of the universe was now resting on Cap's and whoever else was fighting on Earth right now shoulders because Harry Potter suddenly decided that Tony's life was worth more than theirs. And that didn't make since on any level.

Tony already knew what was coming when Strange opened his mouth.

“And I swear to God if you said 'Because I had to' or some bullshit answer like that again, I'm going take that overactive magic carpet you're wearing and cram it down your throat.”

Strange's mouth snapping shut was nearly audible from where Tony was standing. He refused to answer like a petulant child because he knew his answer didn't satisfy them in the least, so why bother to explain to people too stupid to understand. If Strange would just start rattling off about nothing, Tony thought it would be like having to deal with himself. 

God, how did anyone stand him?

_They don't. That's why they leave. Because you either drive them away, or you kill them. Either way, you fail. You always fail._

Tony was just about tell himself to shut up when an ominous growl of thunder cracked, and something shifted. He didn't know what, but he could feel it in his bones. For half-a-heartbeat, he remembered the night his parents died. He felt it then, too, when he reached for the ringing telephone. Just as his hand was about to touch the old white cordless that had been sitting next to him on the couch, he remembered this feeling. It passed through him and somehow he knew that what he was about to hear would be the worst news of his young life. It had made him hesitate before he dismissed it as nothing. In all that happened after, he'd forgotten about that moment. He remembered it now.

The dull _thud_ of deadweight hitting the ground ended that line of thought before Tony had fully realized what the thought had been. In fact, all lines of that thought were completely forgotten the second he saw the kid on his back in the dirt with his entire body seized up and shaking.

“Kid!'

Tony moved and suddenly found the dirt smacking him in the face because his left leg gave out from under him. The pain that had dulled into something just less than excruciating slammed back into him tenfold, but Tony was already trying to push himself back to his feet. The kid needed him, and there was no way in hell he was just going to sit here. He struggled a bit and ended up half crawling, half pulling himself to Peter, but he made himself get there. Strange and Quill were on the kid much faster and doing their best to hold him down when he arrived.

“Should we stick something in his mouth?” Quill asked as he pressed down hard on Peter's shoulders.

“Only if you want him to bit off your fingers while you try!” Strange snapped back.

“I don't know, man!” Quill yelled. “It's what my mom always said to do!” 

“Well, I guess that just proves that idiocy is hereditary,” Strange said as he tried keep Peter's head from slamming into the ground.

Tony could hear them, but their conversation was nothing more than background noise as he focused on Peter.

“Kid,” he said. “Kid. Don't do this. Don't do this, Pete. Come on, kid. Don't do this.”

It was stupid and pointless he knew, but he didn't know what else to do. With all the damage that he had taken in the fight, FRIDAY wasn't even working, so he couldn't even run Peter's vitals. He was completely blind and completely helpless and couldn't do anything but watch the kid seize.

“Don't talk about my mother, you dick!” Quill yelled.

It wasn't his voice that cut through Tony's panic, though: it was Mantis's much softer one that caught Tony's attention. Small, almost breathy, he heard her say, “Something's coming.”

He didn't know what it was, but something in her voice made him tear his attention away from Peter's shaking form to her. She looked at them with her wide, dark eyes full of confusion and a bit of sorrow but saying nothing more. Tony noticed the specks then. He thought that debris of some sort must have been flowing in the wind behind her, but all too quickly he realized that they were coming from her. They _were_ her. A handful of dust blew from her face, and then she crumpled like ash from the end of a cigarette and disappeared.

Tony hadn't even had time to comprehend what was happening before Drax to was slowly blowing away in the wind. He barely had time to peer down before a majority of him had disappeared. 

“Quill?” he asked before dissolving like his friend. 

_Ashes to ashes _, the priest at Tony's parents' funeral had said.__

__Quill looked Tony dead in the eyes, which allowed him to see the exactly moment that Starlord realized that this was happening to him as well. His shoulders slumped a little as he breathed out, “Oh, man.” Then, he was gone._ _

____Dust to dust.__ _ _

__“Tony.”_ _

__Strange was staring at him again with that weird look from before. Tony recognized some of it now; the pleading for him to understand. The problem was, he still didn't know what it was he supposed to understand._ _

__Some genius he turned out to be._ _

__As if he understood, Strange reaffirmed one last time, “There was no other way.”_ _

__Then he crumbled away to nothing more than dust in the wind._ _

__Gone. As if they never existed in the first._ _

__God, what had just happened?_ _

__Tony felt the moment that Peter stopped moving and all the muscles that had been so drawn only seconds before relaxed in a slump. Peter's lulled to the side as a rush of breath released from his lungs, and then he became perfectly still. He should have just looked like he was unconscious, but Tony's mind was overloaded at the moment as it tried to process everything that had happened in the past fifteen minutes. At that moment, Peter didn't look like just another knocked-out teammate. He was too still, too quiet, too _not_ Peter. _ _

____You failed he's dead you failed he's dead youfailedhesdeadyoufailedhesdeaddeaddead__ _ _

__“Pete!” His voice sounded loud and far away all at once as he gave Peter a hard shake. “Peter! Wake up! Come on, kid! Wake up!”_ _

__Peter's – _lifeless_ – body moved sluggishly under his hands as he shook the kid as hard as he could, but he didn't move on his own. He just laid there. He was so quiet, so still. So not the kid that Tony – _ _

__“Don't do this, kid,” he heard himself say through the hammering beat of his own hear in his ears. “You can't do this. You can't do this to me, kid. Pete, do you hear me? You can't do this. You're not allowed to do this.”_ _

____Deaddeaddeadhe'sdeadyoufailedandhe'sgoingtoblowawayinthewind__ _ _

__“Peter!”_ _

__A weak cough and soft groan answered him this time, and a spark of hope ignited in Tony's chest. The cold that he hadn't noticed had taken over his body began to roll away as Peter's face scrunched up and he began to move._ _

__“That's it,” Tony said. “You're alright.”_ _

__Tony wasn't sure who he was trying to reassure more with that statement. No, that was a lie. He knew exactly who had to hear that._ _

__“You're alright.”_ _

__Slowly, Peter blinked his eyes opened. They were a bit out of focus and so tired like the kid hadn't slept in four days, but there was recognition there. He knew who he was looking at but there was also a fair amount of confusion there as well._ _

__“Mr. Stark?” he asked._ _

__Tony could laugh. He almost did, but he didn't trust it to come out that way. Not with the knot that was untangling so quickly in his chest allowing him to breath normally again._ _

__“Yeah, kid,” he said instead._ _

__A frown pulled on the kid's face as if he were trying to decide something._ _

__“I don't feel so good,” he said._ _

__It was the only warning Tony got before the kid twisted himself so that he was on his hands and knees and puked into the dirt._ _


End file.
